Throughout this class, I have found that annotating while I read has helped me a lot. I felt that as I was reading through assigned reading pieces that it was easier to understand the material when I annotated along with the reading. When I looked back on the paper it made it a lot easier to remember what the reading was saying. When I had put brief notes or example to help me understand the reading it became easier to find key information that I could go back to and quote. Also annotating the readings kept me focused on the reading and really helped me make sure I understood what was going. Even if annotations are not assigned with a reading I think that it would still be helpful to do them so you can really take in the knowledge of from the text. The reading that I used for evidence for this was the literacy narrative by Kayla Farrell called ‘Turn Around?’ and the text my Deborah Brandt titled ‘Sponsors of Literacy’. Within these different readings, I wrote down small notes to connect different reading with them but I also wrote down longer annotations to really help myself remember exactly what I was thinking at the time I read it. I think that not ever annotation has to be lengthy, it just needs to make sense to you for later. A good amount of the time not everyone that reads the same text will have the same annotations because something I want to remember most likely will be different than someone else, or a definition I want to know I would write down but someone else may already know it. I think that over the time this semester in this class I have really learned that the annotations I am writing down are for me, to help me in the future so it doesn’t really matter what it looks like in others eyes because they end up helping me in the end.
